I've still not read Wuthering Heights. I disliked all the other Bronte people I've been exposed to, so WH went down on the list behind people who don't make me crazy.

I read The Mayor of Casterbridge, and could sort of dig what Hardy was saying in it -- how Elizabeth-Jane, at the end, tries to find "happiness" by being ecstatic about, like, a patch of sunshine, or finding a penny in the street. But the plotting was so manipulative and the pessimistic message so heavy-handed that I ultimately came away thinking, "Tom, have some Prozac."

Which is not to say that, sometimes, the characters don't haunt me, a little -- I think to myself, I will not become Elizabeth-Jane, because that would Extremely Bad. But most of the time, Hardy pushes his thesis too hard, and it can sometimes be easy to dismiss him.

I'm told his poetry is both more subtle and less depressing, but I've not gotten around to it yet.

And I hate to go back and drag up old stuff, but this keeps niggling at me and I can't let it alone: Deb, I do still feel that you're conflating different kinds of criticism and different approaches to a text. When I talked about not knowing exactly what I thought about a given book until after I'd been in a class full of people hashing it out, I absolutely didn't mean that they were all telling me what to think about it; I absolutely meant that we were all working it out for ourselves, helping each other work it out, illuminating it for one another and sharing our love exactly the way the Buffistas do with episodes of Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Wonderfalls. The same thing Plei was doing when she talked your ear off for two hours about Bats and you loved it. It's not telling someone else how a text must be read, it's loving it out loud, and learning more about that love in the act of articulating it.

And (I think this gets a bit at what Michele was talking about) I do indeed need and value that. Like you, I don't feel a burning need to share my response to a work of literature with everyone around me. I'm usually pretty happy with my own response. However, if I have a big love for something, I'm also hypocritically happy as hell to soak up other people's love of it to see if I can find new ways of loving it myself. I'm bright enough for all everyday purposes, but I'm not brilliant enough to pick up any text and give it an immediately complete reading, responding heart and soul to everything the author poured into it. I haven't the brains or the experience or the range of knowledge to do so. And in college it mattered to me, to all of us, to be able to, as Plei said, riff off each other. Almost all of us had some bit of perspective, some obscure historical fact, some love of a particular myth or poem or folktale in common with the author, some little piece of information that none of the rest of us had. And the sharing of that enlarged the love for all of us.

And in other news, apparently I am Ginger and I also, perversely, want to marry her post about ice cream and broccoli and have its little posty babies.

Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week to pay for his mother's funeal expenses. Fortunately, his reputation rests not on his fiction, but on his nonfiction, particularly The Lives of the Poets and the dictionary.

Oh, I'll give him his props for the whole dictionary thing. But we were innundated with the whole "Johnson: Lion of English Literature!" mistique when I was studying his period, and Rasselas was pointed to as a fine example of the period's fiction. Which it so isn't. If he'd been taught as a non-fiction writer along the lines of Addison and Steele I might have less of a hate on for him.

I had the exact same WH experience, Steph.

I'm also a fan of Anne Bronte, esp. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which is mysterious and eerie, and deals with subject that I was shocked to see treated seriously in the time period. Aside from being a great read, it really made me rethink some of my preconceptions about the period and how people lived and thought.

I read Wuthering Heights when I was around 15, and then again last year. It was like it was two completely different books.

Me too! Well, not last year, but rereading it as an adult made a huge difference. The first time around, the POV confused the hell out of me (I couldn't figure out who the narrator was, when the narration was taking place relative to the story, or how many Cathys there were, which naturally made the plot a bit tricky to follow). But when I reread it, years later, and was able to actually follow it, it was wonderful.

Unlike Jane Eyre, which I loved as a young teen and loathed in high school, mostly due to my utter inability to see what I had liked about Jane the first time around. I should probably give it another try and see if I still find Jane a joyless tightass with no sense of fun.

"Wuthering Heights" was weird. I wanted to slap everyone, especially Cathy, but I'm glad I read it so that I could laugh uproariously at a reference on Frasier re: Niles pining after Daphne.

Do you like reading things through a rather unreliable narrator and having to take PoV considerations into your reading as you go along, P-C? WH is great for that.

Oh Jesus Christ yeah. Dude.

Also great for that (and possibly mentioned recently, I can't be sure) is The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford. This is when narrator POV really began to intrigue me.

Ooh. I'll keep it in mind. I love unreliable narrators, like that in the aforementioned Lolita or in one of my favorite books, The Remains of the Day. It's such a fascinating concept.

The only book that I can remember having a huge hate-on for was Great Expectations, but damned if I can remember why past my annoyance at the prose. Anyone else? Help?

I read it in high school and didn't think much of it, but I read it again freshman year of college and really liked it. There are people who just don't like Dickens, though.

Now, there are some plays that I've only read that I can expound on my hatred for, but that's not the gist of this.

I see no reason why you can't. I mentioned Persians. Literature includes plays.

Read Jude the Obscure in high school. Hated it. Ten years later in grad school, read it again. Thought "maybe I was just being an obnoxious high school senior with no patience for work." Nope. Hated it more. Read The Mayor of Casterbridge last semester. Hate-on is definitely for Hardy, not just for Jude. His characters are never sympathetic, his plots are just excuses to beat people up, and his overall message is basically "life sucks", which I knew on my own, thank you.

You're on so much crack, Madame Bovary lover. Okay, so maybe he's a little bleak, but I've always felt like his works were windows into class, gender, and misfortune.

I'd defend him more, but I'd need to re-read everything he's ever written. Which may take time, as I have to find where I shelved him.

My hate-on is for Lolita, because I thought it was nothing but degradation, emptiness, and ugliness pretending to be deep, meaningful, and important. Which may have been the entire point, but that's why I hate it.

A couple more general comments:

If there's an author in the world where I have a thorough understanding of her historical and literary context, it's Jane Austen. Just because I think it's her mastery of the art and craft of writing--of creating compelling, vivid characters set in communities that come to life every time I re-read her books--that makes her works worth reading 200 years later, doesn't mean I couldn't, say, discuss what I perceive as a certain tension in how she treats matters of class. Especially in Persuasion. I never read it without noticing certain themes that strike me as contradictory, and reflecting on what it says about the England of the era, wondering whether Austen herself noticed them while writing and what she meant by them if she did, comparing how other authors handle similar issues, reflecting on the tensions between upward mobility/rising on merit and an aristocracy of birth and how those still exist in our society, etc. Just because I think Austen was first and foremost a brilliant master of the craft of writing who knew how to tell cracking good stories that are simultaneously damn funny and deeply moving doesn't mean I'm sitting around going, "OMG!1!!! DARCY!!!1!! WOOBIE1!!!!"

I had Monte Cristo (abridged) read to me by my father when I was wee (7 or 8?). I think this speaks volumes about my father's psyche, natch. Guess who he seems himself as?

I read Monte Cristo (abridged) in French at age 15. Since that was mora than half my life ago, I had forgotten how it ended. My memory of it is focussed on the neatness and intricacy of the revenges, and their ultimate worthlessness.

I did read Bridget Jones II and recall it being less amusing than Bridget Jones I, which was only amusing as long as I didn't think too hard about it. I beleive I was at the beach during both reads.